Reviving old family recipes for fine dining menus

Mint

30-05-2025

There may be no better title than 'indigenous food warrior" to describe Sunil Jajoria, the executive chef at Anantara Jewel Bagh Jaipur. For over a decade, he has been researching, reviving and reclaiming native Rajasthani dishes that are lost to time. It started with food stories from his grandmother, which sparked countless hours of research and numerous tours of the villages of Rajasthan. The result is a comprehensive menu of lost dishes at the Jaipur property.
Across the culinary landscape, chefs are turning to archived cookbooks and childhood memories to revive forgotten recipes. Interestingly, the comeback dishes don't belong to royal kitchens, but family and community kitchens. The idea is to offer a unique taste of the past, at the same time infuse modern-day cooking techniques with flavourful twists.
The gosht aur bajre ki tehri is one such dish that Jajoria relished on summer vacations at his ancestral home in Semla-Semli village in Bharatpur district in the late 1990s. 'My grandmother started at 3pm, soaking and pounding millet before slow cooking it with marinated meat in a handi over dung cakes. Spices were kept to a minimum. By 8pm, the melted meat and bajra created an unbelievably mellow and flavourful dish," recalls Jajoria. Today, this dish is rarely made at homes, or done by using short cut methods like pressure-cooking the bajra and meat together. The chef also makes pithod, a dish from Alwar that features slow cooked gramflour cakes simmered in hand-pounded masalas.
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Chef Avinash Martins is on a similar mission at his restaurant Cavatina in South Goa's Benaulim. On his tasting menu is tonnantle bangdo (hay-smoked mackerel), a dish made by the fishermen of Goa. 'They would set out for sail at 2-3 in the morning. And as soon as they caught the catch, either sardines or mackerel, they would toss some on to a makeshift hay fire right on the boat. They broke their fast with this simple dish. I never saw the dish in homes or in restaurants," he says. Martins corrected that by introducing the smoky, umami fish at his restaurant. Caldeirada, a seafood stew introduced by the Portuguese that his grandmother made, also finds a spot on the menu. 'Only a Goan knows what it is to taste something he has only heard of. A 75-year-old couple now settled in Canada had tears in their eyes when they tasted the smoked mackerel as it took them back to their childhood days in Goa," says Martins.
The ease offered by modern-day conveniences has pushed many old recipes into obscurity, believes Jajoria. 'People don't have the time to soak, pound or slow-cook anymore. Many of our old recipes are also laborious. For instance, pithod requires a lot of patience and continuous stirring for 15-20 minutes," he says. The absence of documentation has also caused numerous traditional recipes to first fade from memory, and then be lost. One example is sambhar ki roti, a wheat flour bread from Rajasthan's Sambhar region. Its distinctiveness lies in the tedious preparation: the dough is kneaded solely with ghee and sugar, without any water, and then baked on a bed of heated salt harvested from Sambhar lake. The resulting roti is incredibly delicate and crumbly, almost like a biscuit. According to Jajoria, sambhar ki roti was traditionally packed as a saugat, a special gift from the bride's family to accompany the baraat (wedding procession) to the groom's village.
Chef Arindam Basu at The Oberoi Sukhvilas Spa Resort, New Chandigarh, spent months uncovering old family recipes from villages in Punjab. Khushk mahi kebab is one such dish from a time when river fish were caught wild. To temper the muddy notes (they used river sole, which feeds on small crustaceans and invertebrates on the sandy/muddy bottoms), freshly caught fish was soaked in milk. As commercially farmed river fish, with their more neutral profiles, became prevalent, this nuanced practice gradually faded into obscurity. At Kaanan, a Punjabi restaurant at the resort, the kebabs serve as a delicious homage to the culinary ingenuity of the region.
According to chef Gaurav Paul of Bengaluru Marriott Hotel Whitefield, recipes from a bygone era offer a glimpse into the daily lives, tastes and innovations of previous generations. In the early 1900s, fishermen on the bank of Kirtankhola river (now in Bangladesh) created chingri maacher hurra, when they had a bumper catch of prawns. 'They made a prawn puree and added it to de-shelled prawns cooked in a tomato-onion gravy. The coconut milk and mace powder lend a smooth, aromatic finish," says Paul, who serves the now-extinct dish at the hotel. Then there is mangsher gorgora, a mutton dish prepared by sisters for their brothers on the festival of Bhai Phota. 'The dish derives its name gorgora from the Bengali phrase 'goriye pora', which translates to drool or drip down. When this dish was savoured, the gravy and the oils would drool down from the fingers to the palm," says Paul. So what made these dishes fade from contemporary culinary consciousness? Time-consuming, laborious cooking and rich spices and oil content deter today's health-conscious diners, says the chef, who served these dishes at a food festival in April titled The Lost and Rare Recipes of Bengal.
Changing tastes and modern confectionery also caused the disappearance of the beloved Bihari sweet dish dudhauri (deep-fried rice balls in syrup). 'My grandmother would make dudhauri at family gatherings, especially on winter evenings," says Rachna Prasad, founder of Mumbai-based Ambrosia Kitchen, who makes the dish for her pop-ups.
For chefs, breathing life back into forgotten recipes is a journey through history, culture and culinary artistry. After all, these resurrected dishes offer a unique taste of the past, while also enriching our present-day cooking with diverse flavours and techniques.
Also read: Recreating a lost Rampuri recipe with a new twist
Nivedita Jayaram Pawar is a Mumbai-based food writer